Millennium Payphones for sale

[Troy K]

I can't say this with 100% certainty - but as far as I understood by looking at the card-table and screenshots of the "Telco Maximizer", the telco may also allow creditcard-ICs to be allowed for transactions... But I do have to agree, I have never seen usage of the creditcard-IC in the wild...

Never seen it either, and I've never used a smart calling card in one either. I don't think any of the telcos even sell them anymore. I do know Bell used to have these Quickchange cards years ago.

[Dominic_ContempraPhones]

Answer supervision is still available on a cocot line today in some areas,so based on your statement the ordering of this line should allow this phone to work. But it does not.  Office supervision was used for two things on a payphone, on a smart set to detect a answer, on a dumb set to identify and collect or return a coin. You state they are building the back end to make it work. Back end is a broad term do you mean a CO based program to emulate the function of the Nortel system? Or a small compact unit to simulate the CO?
Below is the link to a Nortel in demo mode you hear  the dialing and the attempt of the phone with a data burst to talk to its data base. It fails and cannot complete the call.  First the switch did not answer the number dialed by the payphone second since the phone did not reach the switch it can't rate the call . It has no on board rate file.  The coin still returns as a result of a office supervision line which it would do on SIC tones which you can here.

The phone has no rating program without the Nortel switch contact,so it does not know what to charge and the call fails plus the switch or program number did not answer.  So if  this  back end would be answering the data stream with the proper credentials and then defining the rate based on the dialed number passed by data stream it would work.
But you would still have to have a office supervision line that reversed the battery on a answer,and or maybe collect return voltage I have no clue if the line produced that voltage or the transformer.
I believe the phone dialed the data base sent the data downloaded the info hung up and redialed the dialed number in very fast succession but I have no way of knowing that for sure without standing there with a butt set during the call.
I welcome anybody to challenge me if I am wrong I would love to know more about how they worked but I think I am close to the call process.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OUsqiUFiBTs

This link someone trying to get around the credentials.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oW5_OZahsGE

https://www.hackcanada.com/canadian/payphones/millenium.txt

You had to go into servord on dms-100.  For Centurions the reversal you're talking about was called RCD - reverse coin disposal.

Millennium uses an ordinary line with LRA - Line Reversal on Answer -- the polarity flips when ringback commences and then flips back to normal when the called party answers.  LRS - Line Reversal on Seizure was for PBXs.

On Millennium, once the reversal starts, the microphone is disabled.  DMS will not reverse on 0 minus, 0 plus, 911, 411, 611, etc. so if you put in a coin, you'll get it back.

Millennium didn't have to contact Millennium Manager on every call, just toll calls, and when its call detail records table reached a certain %, and every so often -- once a day they would call in to say, I'm still alive and my coin box is x or getting close to full.  Alarms would trigger a dial-in, if it could. If MM didn't hear from a phone for a while, it showed up on a report and a guy would be sent out.

It uses a Bell 212A modem.  I saw the schema but it's X.25 over dialup.  Doesn't matter, you just have to send the data down in Bell 212A at 1200 baud, but the structure and sequence to populate the local tables would be impossible to figure out without documentation.   Nortel Network Operations Control could call into the phone and provision it too.  You could put in a wildcard for free numbers and it was changed later on for 100 local tuples for toll ... a tuple was npa nxx.  A pretranslator was downloaded too along with a list of numbers on the PCP that would go through during a power outage.

I don't know how the download image was structured -- otherwise it should be fairly easy to provision.  Every card or toll call went to MM, but locals and coin and stored value cards did not contact MM, so it's not true that it needed MM to work.

These guys that are working on it can't possibly figure out what the download image format is unless they have a copy of one for a specific version.

[Troy K]

From what I've read online, a telco in Ecuador made their own Millennium Manager by reverse engineering the phones themselves. It was the product of a thesis at a university there, it makes for an interesting read however it's all in Spanish.

This is also an interesting document, covering the MM database tables: https://github.com/muccc/millennium/blob/master/documentation/manager/A0xxxxxx_00_02.pdf

[Dominic_ContempraPhones]

That's easy.  That's SQL/MX although Net Venue used Oracle 7.3.4 when 8i was out and they used SUN Sparc.  BNR did use a proprietary protocol over Bell 212A modulation, but I am skeptical that without documentation they were able to do what they claim.  I have the 212A and x.25 APIs, so were they able to determine the table download structure.  It could be as simple as comma delimited.

I did work at Nortel so I should be able to figure it out.  I did contact former BNR Calgary but they don't have it anymore.  It's essentially a file transfer and that's it.  MM call ins are disabled.  LRA is easy to get, and the dumb thing should work.

[Troy K]

I've heard that demo firmware for these phones is out there somewhere. Though Nortel and Quortech would deny they ever existed.

It's really too bad Nortel went the way they did, they had some pretty cool innovative things.

[Kimball321]

From what I've read online, a telco in Ecuador made their own Millennium Manager by reverse engineering the phones themselves. It was the product of a thesis at a university there, it makes for an interesting read however it's all in Spanish.

This is also an interesting document, covering the MM database tables: https://github.com/muccc/millennium/blob/master/documentation/manager/A0xxxxxx_00_02.pdf

Did you find the thesis online, and if so do you have a link?

[Troy K]

Did you find the thesis online, and if so do you have a link?

Yep, here's the link: http://www.dspace.ups.edu.ec/handle/123456789/993

The download link is near the bottom. The file appears to be protected so you won't be able to copy the text to translate it easily, though some of the diagrams and such are in English.